This body-parts story is a thoroughly horrible business, but it is somewhat cheering to see how many people worked long and hard — though unsuccessfully — to try to prevent the tragedy from happening.

As soon as a kitten-killing video was posted to YouTube, in December of 2010, people around the world started to work together on websites, sharing information and trying to track down the guy who killed the cats.

By Wednesday, when police announced that Luka Magnotta was the suspect in the body-parts homicide, animal lovers around the world had been on his trail for two years.

They notified humane societies and police departments in Toronto and Montreal, posted rewards, spent countless hours poring over videos and photos for clues, established a thick dossier on Magnotta, and identified fake Internet personas that seemed to be leaving false trails to confuse the people pursuing him.

They were motivated by four horrible videos in which a young man gleefully kills kittens. In the first one, in 2010, a young man alleged to be Magnotta suffocates two kittens in a plastic bag. A few weeks later, he posted a related video.

By January of 2011, after frantic online searching, animal lovers tentatively had identified Magnotta as the suspect. They meticulously compared photos that Magnotta posted of himself, identifying jewelry and furnishings that appeared in both, until they were certain they had found the right guy.

They then focused on finding him, something which was made more difficult by the many apparently fake photos Magnotta seems to have posted — using a host of false online identities — showing him in cities around the world.

Volunteers analyzed the digital fingerprints of the photographs and identified the camera used to make the videos, linking it to photos of Magnotta. They tracked down products in the background of his pictures, tried to figure out when and where they were sold.

They tried to place him in particular places at particular times, using film posters and landmarks in the backgrounds, analyzed accidental reflections of his camera, and established that he was in the Toronto area.

In December 2011, he posted two more videos, in which kittens were killed in horrible ways.

On the Facebook group where they shared photos, member after member fretted that he would move on to human victims.

"He might end up killing human beings one day though," wrote one member in December 2011. "He might just not stop with animals. He needs to be caught ASAP."

They posted images of him around the Internet, and on bulletin boards in the real world.

By January, they thought he was in Montreal.

"Its possible that he has a part time residence in Montreal," one Facebook user wrote. "We have verified the info, but we do not know where exactly in Montreal."

In February, a British national involved in the hunt for Magnotta wrote to a Canadian involved in the animal rights movement, looking for help.

"We are currently searching his current location and have pinpointed two addresses in Montreal," he wrote. "We had one sighting (to be confirmed) as recent as yesterday. The net is closing in. However, animal rights laws in Montreal are almost non-existent.

"In essence we need police help but the police won't act upon anything, that we are aware of, until we can determine where the videos were created and/or where the videos were uploaded from. YouTube won't release IP information until notified by the police."

In a statement released Thursday, the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals reported that after being informed of the allegations in February, 2011, they reached out to Toronto Police, the FBI, the RCMP, the Quebec Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Montreal police.

Montreal police are dealing with a Mafia war, various corruption investigations and, more recently, a mass student protest, and may not have had time to track down a kitten killer.

They are running a manhunt now, surely working desperately, around the clock, to track Magnotta down before someone else is killed. They need to focus on that, but they will have questions to answer eventually.

Commander Ian Lafrenière, of the Montreal Police Service, told me Thursday that he doesn’t know yet what kind of information the force received about Magnotta and the kittens, but animal protection law is not as strong in Quebec as it is in other jurisdictions.

"The question is, when this is over, can we backtrack and check this out? You know what, we've been there for more than 130 years and we're still improving. So if something could have been done better we're more than happy to do so."

His police force and others should ask themselves these questions. Well-meaning people around the world were ringing alarm bells about Magnotta, and the police seem not to have heard.

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